Opinion Editorial

Rove, Connell, and the web connecting Florida and Ohio

On 9-18-2000, Ira Glass broadcast about the FBI’s investigation into Archer Daniels Midland’s (ADM’s) global price fixing of lysine. The price fixing meetings happened in run-of-the-mill hotels common to the type used for local booster club lunches.

Kurt Eichenwald, who wrote about the conspiracy, said something to the effect: "I have written a lot about corporate crime over the years and I used to say -- but I won’t say it anymore! -- that it is a misconception that white collar crime starts with the top level executive sitting and pointing at an underling and saying ‘Let’s go break the law.’ But boy was I wrong. You look at these tapes, it’s indisputable that that is exactly what was happening.” And Bob Herndon, the FBI agent said, “We used to joke at one point in the case that if you saw a group of middle-aged white males with grey hair getting together in a hotel in the middle of the day, no good could come from that.”¹

In criminal investigations, evidence must be collected, validated, verified and placed into context. Obviously, there’s rarely the undoctored photograph of the murderer pulling the trigger with the gun barrel planted against the victim’s forehead (the exceptions, of course, are so rare to be infamous – Jack Ruby for one, for another, the Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong operative in the street with the gun, the smoke and the anguished expression on the face of the victim all captured in clear black and white film).

Instead, most investigations rely on years of passionate research, amassing of data, looking for patterns that lead ultimately to a fuller understanding of the crime, the criminals and the laws broken. Sometimes, we get lucky and the perpetrators leave fingerprints.

Such is the work of Luaptifer and the many researchers plodding with him along in the piles of data – they have spent years sifting through internet records, data mining, looking for patterns.

He and his team have had several breakthroughs: they’ve found that the IT guru for the Republican party, the man who dedicated his IT expertise in network security and his niche marketing expertise in the ability to pinpoint the exact households primed to buy or vote one way, that one man held the keys to the kingdom in both 2000 and in 2004.

Quick: Which state decided the 2004 Presidential election?

Ohio.

Previously, Luaptifer’s team had discovered that Mike Connell, the Republican IT guru (who had built the GeorgeWBush campaign website) – somehow conveniently was the same IT guru who built and maintained the supposedly non-partisan Ohio Vote Election Results system. According to their research, that system, oddly enough, in the last critical hours before the polls closed, rerouted the votes through Tennessee and the Republican partisan’s servers, creating a delay that some allege was long enough to do some key vote tweaking.

But now, the team lays out the data that shows in 2000, Mike Connell also had access to software behind the firewall protecting another state government’s election software.

Quick: Which state’s vote “determined” the outcome of the 2000 election?

Florida, of course.

Much has been written, dissected, and testified to (Truth for a Change: House Judiciary sub-committee forum on Ohio vote irregularities --December 13, 2004 ) ² in regard to the Ohio 2004 election. Now, for the first time, Luaptifer’s group has compiled lists of the Florida internet contracts (Connell worked on at least four), Florida business and political affiliations, including house sharing, as well as the niche marketing expertise of Mike Connell, the IT security genius behind the Ohio vote tally.

The pattern is emerging: From certain perspectives, Florida was wildly successful –perhaps due to, at that time the relatively unknown, Mike Connell – but he seems to have left finger prints, however, and they might be matching the ones found in Ohio.

¹ Kurt Eichenwald, at the 30:29 mark. Bob Herndon, at the 50:05 mark.

²From This American Life’s website about the broadcast:

We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.

³ transcript of the hearings transcript of the December 13th Judicial Inquiry into the Ohio Voting Irregularities

About the Authors: Cho is an editor with ePluribus Media. Bronxdem is a fact checker and researcher extraordinaire with ePluribus Media. Photo credits: (c) 2008 emrah Turnudu, istockphoto